Book review: A funny but disorientating experience

Kevin Smith's prose is full of fresh, sophisticated yet unpretentious passages.

• Injury Time 
• Kevin Smith 
• The Lilliput Press, €16.95 

The Lilliput Press, a vivacious independent publisher with a reputation for talent-spotting, can consistently be relied upon to produce great writing. 

Kevin Smith, whose humorous third novel takes us back to post-Brexit suburban Belfast, is an undoubtedly gifted stylist.

His prose is full of fresh, sophisticated yet unpretentious passages: “These moments of ache were becoming more frequent, each tiny, half-grasped epiphany gone in the breeze like a breath of diesel.”

Small details like “wedding-cake-white teeth”, “elderly couples moving at aquarium speed”, and a “stained graph-paper shirt” create a convincingly commonplace canvas.

Injury Time begins promisingly, with our protagonist, Fenton, receiving good news about a benign cyst as his 50th birthday approaches: 

“Thirty had been a shock, forty a real kick in the teeth, but fifty? Fifty you were out there in the open, on the parched veldt, and those were live rounds in the distance.”

The scene is set for a fast-paced satire, but like an avatar that has been hastily created and customised so that the game can start already, Fenton’s characterisation feels uneven as the novel levels up.

He is presented to us as a successful entrepreneur, but it’s mostly other people who are giving and making Fenton his money. 

This would land more persuasively if his sizeable income were as passive as his disposition, but he was the owner of a tanning salon empire, a dying business model he doesn’t diversify until just one outlet remains.

There are plenty of ways for a magnate to go bust, yet Fenton appears to have done so at such a glacial speed that a considerable suspension of disbelief is required if we’re to accept that his business acumen has bankrolled such a lavish lifestyle. 

It’s also difficult to reconcile his stated motivations with the character we are presented with.

It’s suggested Fenton was a bully and philanderer growing up, and is now a shallow, cash-obsessed businessman.

What manifests on the page is something more akin to an anxious, ageing Adrian Mole-esque figure with charming neurotic tendencies, who takes self-defence classes after an altercation in a pub.

Many of Fenton’s musings feel better suited to his poet brother, Artie, who reflects that his sibling “had always coasted along, frictionless, insulated, adept in the material world”.

Driving the plot forward is the unforeseen solicitor’s letter Fenton receives the day before his birthday, which commands “the entirety of his electrified attention” and threatens to implode his life.

While Fenton is our focus, the book is interspersed with sections from other characters’ perspectives, both major and minor.

These are expertly interwoven, as are sensitive explorations of aging and identity. 

Smith also has humour on his side — Injury Time is a funny book, side-splittingly so at times — but the confusing nature of its main character results in a disorientating experience, like listening to a radio that is jigging between two frequencies.

On a micro level, the writing can’t be faulted and contains rich, painterly descriptions that make for pleasurable reading: “the hills were damply plush beneath a film of haze, and the sky was flax-flower blue beyond them, faint racks of cloud like smears on a hastily wiped table. The 10 a.m. Belfast-bound train was flexing along the embankment, gleaming like a toy fresh from its box.”

Still, there’s a gulf between great writing and a great novel that Injury Time doesn’t quite bridge. That said, as his brother tells Fenton: “It’s liberating to see the world through a skilful writer’s mind.” 

I am intrigued to explore more of Smith’s work (his debut novel was nominated for the Desmond Elliott Prize) and eagerly await whatever he does next.